In our particular life in the world — from the slow breakdown of a relationship, to years of physical abuse, from sudden accidents which devastate a family, to illness and death, to our common life in the world — from plagues to genocide and war, suffering due to sin and evil is our intense experience. In response, people of faith, as well as those who struggle with their faith, and even those without a working faith ask: “Where is God?” People asked it after 9/11, after the earthquake in Haiti, after a child is abused and murdered — where is God? How does faith in God make sense on a planet soaked in tears from crust to core? We hope this is a straightforward question which requires a straightforward answer. Yet great art, scholarship and of course sacred texts and world religions have grappled with this very issue from prehistory. All come to the conclusion that easy answers will not be forthcoming. Where does evil come from? Why do the cruel seem to prosper in God’s good creation? Where is God when we are hurting? In the space of this column, we may only take up the last of these questions.
There is us and there is our pain and there is God. The connection between the first two terms appears straightforward: we feel pain, indeed if it is deep enough it breaks the limits of our humanity, and some human beings are broken beyond any apparent wholeness. But where is God? God is not present as a deus ex machina, a being who appears on the stage in the climax of a tragic play to make all things well to the satisfaction of the audience. The book of Job makes clear that the god Job was worshipping, sacrificing to and trying to placate was a god made in Job’s image, or the image of the wisdom of the day. Indeed there is a God beyond what Job and his friends could conceive. When Job finally gets a glimpse not before but in the very midst of his terror, when the unnamable One is revealed within the whirlwind, Job, the man who knows human anguish from the inside, confesses that he does not know: “I have spoken of the unspeakable and tried to grasp the infinite.” (Job 42:3)
That being confessed, is that it? Is that where we are left in our own anguish?
The answer in our scriptures is No! A world deformed by suffering and broken by evil requires not only insight but redemption. And so God incarnates God’s self in the world as compassion. Jesus’ story of The Compassionate Father (better known as The Prodigal Son) is the manifestation of compassion as forgiveness. Here the guilt of the younger son manifest in his own degradation, as well as the devastation his actions cause to his family and village, is absorbed by the father in the costly forgiveness, welcome and restoration of his son. Jesus’ story of The Good Samaritan manifests compassion as care for a bleeding mass of flesh left for dead by the side of the road. Compassion is not only suffering with, compassion effects actual change, at great cost it restores what evil and suffering have devastated. This restoration happens not “in the sweet by and by” but in the here and now.
Ultimately for Christians, God assumes our suffering in the Christ. In history, in the midst of concrete suffering, demons are exorcised, the sick are healed, oppressors are confronted and sin is forgiven. God labours in the world to mediate the transformative power of compassion. On the cross, evil is transmuted into God’s own suffering. Evil is not perpetuated, it is absorbed. This is the divine response in the world in the face of radical evil. All the evil in the world cannot overwhelm the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. After listing the reality of suffering, from hardship to the sword, the Apostle Paul asks: can any and all of this together “separate us from the love of Christ?” Then he affirms what has been revealed to him in his own life and body: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:37-39)
These are not easy words to express. We receive them as a word from the Lord to us, because we know human beings can be broken by suffering. There are front-line care-givers who work with victims of torture, those who work with traumatized soldiers, those who work in the rehabilitation of prisoners, who testify to the reality that some people will never be whole again. If we deny this reality, compassion can degenerate into sentimentality. Within the Christian tradition, such persons are at the foot of the cross, they are closest to Jesus who cried out: “Why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15.34) They may come to taste the divine love in the very centre of their soul, even when they have lost everything else, including their dignity. In such circumstances the exchange of compassion from one human being to another is nothing other than a dying to self. Simone Weil, the French activist and mystic, called this form of compassion “attention.” In touching the afflicted with their eyes or their hands, what those who practice attention are in fact doing is “very different from feeding, clothing, or taking care of them.” Through the practice of attention they enter those they help and “give them for a moment — what affliction has deprived them of — an existence of their own.”
God is not present as a benevolent deity manipulating history or nature to prevent the suffering of creatures who feel pain, nor a cosmic magician who makes our anguish disappear. God is present in the poor, the sick, the imprisoned and the hungry, but God is also present in the power of compassion extended to each of the least of these. (Matthew 25.40) God entered time and space in the Christ in whom evil was absorbed and death was defeated, and God continues to be present, even in a fragmentary way, in communities gathered by the power of the Spirit to bear the suffering of the world. Finally, the defeat of evil on the cross, and the defeat of death in the resurrection, is God’s promise to us that though we live in real time within a veil of tears, suffering does not have to define us nor does it have the final word on us. The final word belongs to the One who has created us and redeems us in costly love from which nothing can separate us.
Study Guide:
I offer three books for further reading and reflection:
Wendy Farley, Tragic Vision and Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990
Douglas John Hall, God and Human Suffering: An Exercise in the Theology of the Cross. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986.
Simone Weil, Waiting for God. Trans. Emma Craufurd. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
- The book of Job indicates that the reality we call God is greater than the containers we have for this reality. Do you think it is important to acknowledge the mystery of God when considering the relationship between the Creator and creaturely suffering? Why? or why not?
- Theologians have distinguished between the suffering due to sin (one’s own guilt), and innocent suffering (which is not a consequence of guilt). From the biblical tradition, how does God respond to our suffering in each of these circumstances?
- How do you respond to the reality of radical suffering? This is the kind of suffering which is said to destroy a person from the inside. In other words one is not made better through this suffering — one is not brought to a greater maturity or understanding, rather the capacity of a person to know hope or to feel love is degraded. Consider the particular instance of child abuse or torture, or the political reality of genocide. How can faith in the God of the bible make sense here? What is available to us in the biblical tradition: within the wisdom literature, the psalms, the prophets, the gospels, the epistles? Can you think of art: music, painting, literature, which gives expression to radical suffering? Is there any particular artistic expression which you have found meaningful? In giving artistic expression to radical suffering, do you think anything is changed?
- When people ask where is God in the midst of one’s own suffering or after mass devastation, what would be your response? How might God be felt to be absent in these situations? How might God’s presence be mediated in such situations?
- More than the abstract question: “does God exist?” people ask the question: “if God exists why is there so much suffering in the world?” Is this a question that you ask? What are some responses from the bible? What are some responses outside the scriptures or the Christian tradition?
